Madhu Krishna Chitrakar (PUNG) and Sangita Chitrakar (PUNG) Hess

January 14th - February 8th

Reception: February 1st, 6pm - 8pm

Lecture on The Role of Art in Tibetan Buddhism with Ana Lopes: January 25th, 6pm

Madhu Krishna Chitrakar (PUNG) and Sangita Chitrakar (PUNG) Hess will travel from Nepal to Greensboro to exhibit their thangkha paintings and interact with the community. 

Madhu Krishna Chitrakar is a world-renowned thanghka painter. Born in Bhaktapur, Nepal in 1952, Mr. Chitrakar comes from a long line of traditional artists whose paintings are used for a variety of religious practices, such as temple ceremonies, meditation, and depicting the life of the Buddha. Mr. Chitrakar completed a BA from Tribhuvan University in 1976, and worked for the Nepali government between 1982-1986. In 1986, he was hired to renovate the religious art in Nepal's Royal Palace. Since that time, he has exhibited his art and run painting workshops in Nepal, Germany, and The Netherlands. Many articles and publications have been written about Mr. Chitrakar's ouevre, such as Dr. E. Moser's Newar Mallerei, Mannheim 1983) and Dr. M. L. B. Blom's Depicted Deities (Utrecht 1986).



Ana Cristina O. Lopes

Ana Cristina O. Lopes is an anthropologist with a Ph.D. from the University of Sao Paulo and a M.A. in Buddhist Studies from Columbia University. She has conducted years of fieldwork throughout Asia, Europe and the Americas and specializes in the study of Buddhism, anthropology of expressive forms, visual anthropology and globalization. She has taught at the University of Virginia’s Department of Religious Studies and held appointments as visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of World Religions (Harvard University) and at the Department of Performance Studies (Tisch School – New York University).

Ana Cristina is the author of the book Tibetan Buddhism in Diaspora: Cultural Re-signification in Practice and Institutions (Routledge 2015), a pioneering work about the contemporary global spread of Tibetan Buddhism. In her present research she is investigating the social construction of notions of human flourishing and well-being in light of the impact that scientific research on contemplative practices and its diverse applications has had on contemporary societies, focusing in particular on scientific experiments conducted with Buddhist meditators. She is currently finalizing her first ethnographic movie Kalachakra: Circle of Time, a 73-minute visual essay about the Kalachakra Initiation presided over by the Dalai Lama in Bodhgaya in the beginning of 2012.

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